Page 159 - The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend

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Jack Fritscher 143

that seems irrelevant to [his attorney. He then added the
kicker.] I wonder whether you would be kind enough to
provide a back channel for Nazca Plains to try and settle
the matter with the family...

Moseley’s plan would have flooded the market with a deval-
ued dump of Larry’s remaindered books. He wrote:

As an aside, our plan is to donate, on behalf of Larry’s
heirs, the thousands of authorized [sic] and contracted
[sic] books in our warehouse to the Leather Museum
[Leather Archives & Museum of Chicago] who could
issue a tax receipt that the family could then use as a
deduction against probate taxes... If you can believe
[Larry’s attorney], she claims to have learned of Larry’s
death for the first time from reading your column.

I washed my hands of the case. My concern had been for
Larry himself, and then for the bookstores, in the misbegotten
lawsuit in which everyone involved, including the attorney, was
probably an innocent bystander caught up in his frustration about
his lifelong exclusion from the gay mainstream.
I wasn’t going to ask what makes people misbehave, or seem
evil, as Joan Didion ruminated in her first line in Play It as It Lays:
“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
Maybe the fighting frenemies brunching at the French Quar-
ter were all swept away by something weird in LA—something
raw in the blistering Santa Ana desert winds that every autumn
blow down from the eastern mountains, west across LA, and make
locals go mental sitting isolated in their cars on the 405 threading
bumper-to-bumper through the slow tangle of the smoky free-
ways as the dry Santa Anas set the hills around LA on fire.
On August 20, 2008, a month after Larry passed, his family
invited Mark and me to his home in Los Angeles to help begin
to identify and sort his archive of writing, art, and photography
which we did finally around the dining-room table of his niece’s
home in Berkeley. In 2012, Carole Queen, founder of the San
Francisco Center for Sex & Culture blogged, “We are so grateful
to have been gifted with [some of] Townsend’s archives.” Queen’s

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